Outdoors: Poaching very common in China, Southeast Asia

I'd normally be ecstatic watching a whimbrel and little curlew up very close. But this time, I felt terrible because they were in a cage — for sale to be eaten.

During a month of investigating poaching in China this spring, I walked through the enormous food market in Fuzhou observing countless fish, shellfish and other wild edibles. I wasn't prepared for cages of wild birds that even included little larks.

With an infusion of new money, China's cities offer just about anything you want, including rare and endangered species that are considered delicacies, symbols of status or traditional medicines.

Traveling across China, I saw many wild animals for sale in food markets, including snakes and turtles. The latter have consequently been wiped out from much of Southeast Asia. I suspect one day we'll have to worry about our local snapping turtles making up for the lack of Asian turtles. And with the Chinese demand for bear gall bladders being harder to meet, we're likely to have bear poaching with Asian connections increase here in the future, too.

In the traditional medicine pharmacies where I brought my camera to document the sale of rarities, I was asked not to photograph. The vendors didn't want trouble. After all, it's illegal to sell endangered plants and animals in China. The laws exist — but the necessary degree of education and resolve for enforcement do not.

I spent most of my time in China's border regions with Tibet, Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Vietnam, primarily looking for importation evidence of tiger, elephant and rhino. All three species are declining alarmingly largely because of China's demand for them. India's tiger population, for example, has crashed from a high of 100,000 to just 1,200 primarily because tiger parts, especially tiger penis and tiger bones, are believed to treat erectile dysfunction.

While China is guilty of considerable illegal international wildlife trade, I was surprised to learn that Vietnam has surpassed it as the No. 1 arch-villain of rhino poaching. The heavy drinking nouveau riche of Vietnam have come to look upon the expensive powder from a rhino's ground-up horn as a status symbol to ostentatiously use and impressively share to minimize hangover.

More tragically, Vietnam's human population, suffering from severe environmental pollution (much of it carcinogenic, like agent orange) is experiencing excessively high incidences of cancer. With limited opportunities for treatment and fatality percentages among the highest in the world, cancer victims are grasping for any possible remedy.

Rhino horn demand skyrocketed beginning in 2006 with news that a Vietnam politician survived cancer after taking rhino horn treatment. Vietnamese cancer victims are paying exorbitant sums for what chemically amounts to keratin — the same material in a powdered fingernail.

A single rhino horn has brought as much as $300,000 on the black market. The value put on the horn brought Vietnamese — never before known as great international hunters — to South Africa in increasing numbers to sport hunt rhino. When it became apparent the horns were actually going to the market, limitations were imposed on them. Then the poaching really accelerated.

That demand has gotten so bad that many hunters' mounted rhino heads in museums and other collections around the world are being stolen.

While I couldn't find a Chinese connection with rhino horn — penalties are too high to deal with questionably troublesome people like me — I did come upon numerous instances of wildlife being illegally traded, sometimes in plain sight. Finding tiger skins, which I observed commonly in Hong Kong 30 years ago, is now quite difficult, as are the tiger bones. But one can purchase both with the right contacts and a lot of money.

I also found plenty of places selling ivory, including one of the high-end shops in a fancy international-chain hotel. But what shocked me most was the extent to which pangolin, a rare and endangered species, is being poached for Chinese medicinal demands.

I know the pangolin well because it's the animal I find most difficult to show to photographers on the African safaris I lead. They've become so rare that some guides have seen only one in their entire life. The Chinese belief that the ground-up scales of the pangolin, a mammal with a protective covering similar to an armadillo, are a curative and its flesh a delicacy. The four world pangolin species are near extinction.

The government is trying to stop the poaching, but with buyers willing to pay as much as $1,000 for one, it is largely failing. I was told by my driver that he could arrange a secret meeting for me to buy one if I were serious. In May, surprisingly, after a lucky tip, police in Guangdong province found 956 pangolin carcasses weighing about 8,000 pounds being transported by poachers, who were apprehended and now face fines and jail sentences in excess of 10 years. How many shipments go through without being tipped off is anyone's guess. This bust is, I'm told, just the tip of the iceberg.

It's clear that as long as China believes that animal parts can cure human health problems, wildlife will continue to be poached. As valuable animal populations plummet, demand for them will exceed supply, and prices will increase, accelerating their path to extinction.

There's so much medical and environmental education that urgently needs to be carried out in Asia — and sadly not enough resources and enlightened leadership to do it.

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